What do you want from me, Michael?
by wrldpossibility
Summary: I was recently given the prompt on Tumblr: Would you be so kind as to write a fanfic about Michael's thoughts, before during and after, Michael and Sara's first kiss in the infirmary?


She's in a good mood. She catches his eye as she makes her way down the infirmary hallway toward him, and she allows the smallest smile, just a breath of a smile, really, to touch her lips and eyes. Later, Michael will wonder if that smile changed everything. If it kept him from crashing and burning, stopped him from trying to snag that red-rubbered key from the ring in her pocket right then and there. Because Sara Tancredi smiles are rare. They're earned, and he wouldn't, couldn't, throw one away with a clumsy snatch-and-grab. Surprisingly, not even for the escape. Not even for Lincoln.

That smile has Michael, who doesn't piss without a plan, crumpling all his ideas—contingencies, strategies—into balled up sheets of paper in his mind's eye and tossing them into the trash bin. He walks into the exam room completely unprepared. Stares at the key ring dangling out of her pocket. Stares at it hard. Swallows. He feels her fingers dabbing the gauze to his burn, and then she turns away to discard her gloves and in the split second before she turns to catch him looking at her, he knows what he wants to do. And saying he knows what he _wants_ to do is entirely different from saying he knows what he must do. _Must do_ has fallen way down his list of priorities.

He doesn't wait. The moment she turns to face him, without a word, he draws an intake of breath like a man preparing to go under the surface of something impossibly deep, and he kisses her.

He pauses, hovering there. Gives her an inch of space in which she could take a step back, turn her head, anything. He waits for her exclamation, maybe the sting of her slap, for her to stagger back into the medical cabinet behind her, causing a cacophony of warning bells. Instead, feels her hand rise to palm the surface of his cheek. She rests it there. And so he kisses her again. Three times. She draws back slightly, both hands now on his face. Exhales hard, with a half-laugh, half-cry, and leans into him.

Michael waits for her to gather herself; he only has perhaps a second, maybe two, before she wraps her mind around this, and decides, definitively, how she feels about it. Of course, _ihe/i_ already knows how she feels, because she's already had exactly seven seconds in which to stop it.

She poses her verdict in the form of a question. "What do you want from me, Michael?"

There it is again…want. Not need. If she'd said 'need', would he have told her? He drops his eyes to stare at the key ring again. "Sara. I need you to do something for me."

"What?" Her jaw clenches slightly around the twitch of a muscle, and he hears the nerves behind the single syllable. How far could he push her, right this second? He's learned something in here: you can use people for your purposes, but they tend to get a little worse for the wear. Her eyes are bright with excitement, her cheeks flushed. Her skin, against his fingers, warm. He can't fathom damaging her. He looks down again. She forces his gaze back to her face. To all the possibility there. All the naked want.

"Wait for me?"

He strokes her hair. "It won't always be like this. In this room. In this place." He means it. He's better than this. They're better than this. This is real.

She captures his hand. Kisses his knuckles. "Until then I can't. We can't."

Her orderly steps into the room; despite his 6'3" frame and ex-football player build, Michael barely notices his presence. Sara does.

"Dammit. I can't. And I gotta go."

* * *

He won't manipulate Sara himself, but as it turns out, he can ask Nika to dirty her hands on his behalf. He regrets it almost immediately, but when she presses the keys into his hand at visitation, he closes his fist around them. A hour later, he watches Sara walk past the yard, shielded by her nurse's umbrella. She makes eye contact, and there it is again: the small smile that makes him move mountains, changing course mid-stride. She can't resist one more glance, over her shoulder, curtain of hair shielding her from broadcasting her feelings all over the yard.

"You working a game on her?" Sucre asks. Sucre doesn't miss a look like that.

"I don't know." It feels beyond his control now, a living thing blinking back at him, stretching its legs and ready to run.

* * *

In the infirmary that afternoon, anger radiates from Sara like heat waves from blacktop: invisible, silent, suffocating. She's put it together: Nika. Her missing keys. Their sudden reappearance at the arrival of Michael. The locksmith is already at the door. Michael expected nothing less from her. He realizes he'd actually be disappointed in anything less. She'd already warned him, after all: she won't be that woman. Certainly not while being played the fool. And that's when he finally understands: if he wants something from Sara, if he needs something, something that his brother depends on, he just needs to ask. Outright. Cards on the table.

It's time for a Hail Mary. Her words are still echoing in his head as he reluctantly steps back into the hallway.

 _We're done here._

We'll see.


End file.
